One of the most popular projects we’ve featured here was Dave Hunt’s PiPhone. It’s a working mobile phone built around a Raspberry Pi; it does all the telephony you’d expect, but it’s a smart-ish phone, not a complete smart phone, which made some of you sad.

In the year since the PiPhone was first built, Tyler Spadgenske has been beavering away at his own version, which improves on the original. We think it’s rather splendid.

What’s new here? The TyTelli can take photos (and send them to Dropbox or another device), send texts and manage its own battery level, as well as placing and taking calls. Tyler wrote his own OS in Python, 3d-printed a rather smart enclosure, and now has a phone he’s built from the bottom up – hardware and software both.

But rather than developing your own OS, why not try FireFox OS or Android OSP?
I don’t know the current state of these projects, but it could be nice!
(Is the broadcom SoC powerful enough? What is its raw power, in comparison to an Apple A4 ? My iPhone 4 still works really well, and do A LOT of things)

Hi there, I really love this project. Are there any plans for a Raspberry Pi 2 version? The 1GB of RAM would do just great as a 100% replacement for my Galaxy S2, which I am selling in order to acquire the funds to do this project.

In all honesty, Android is a disgrace to the spirit of tinkering that is a complete Linux distribution, therefore I want no part of it. The RPi has enabled me to ditch Android for good.

Please reply back to me if there are any other Raspberry Pi projects using either the B+ or Pi 2 models.

Still nobody take that oh-so-important step? Raspberry Pi 2 now runs Android, and we have all the 4G-capable wireless modules, screens and capacitive digitizers out there, just somebody get a full blown Android smartphone out of it? (Cost issue? I know this is costly and that is why I am not at it.) Is it possible to fit AOSP or Cyanogenmod on top of the standard Raspbian kernel? I wonder how the smartphone industry that is battling hard amongst the patents will react to a real Raspberry Pi smartphone, and will that solve the modular smartphone mysteries